«You're making a terrible mistake,» she said. «Why not change your mind and come with me?»
Blade shook his head. He was a slave, the computer his master, and how could he explain that?
The blonde opened her mink coat. Her breasts were resplendent, breathtaking, little pointed bombs of satin flesh. Her nipples crackled and gave off sparks. Around her waist was a garter belt made of puce neon. It kept flashing off and on-follow me to Paradise.
Blade left her and found his platform. He felt like a fool. It was foolish to take a train to Hell when he should be following the blonde to Paradise, but what could he do? The computer commanded.
He was alone on the platform. He heard the sound of a train approaching. The sound grew and grew into a roar, filling the bowels of the earth. Blade cringed. A terrible odor filled the platform, an odious stench that made Blade hold his nose. He wished the train would hurry up.
The train slid into the station. It was brightly lit and empty. The destination board said: HELL. Blade stepped aboard and the doors wheezed shut after him. The train lurched out of the station. Blade found that he was alone. There were no other passengers. He began to walk through the cars.
They were all the same. Bright and empty. Newly painted. The paint had a sulphur smell about it. Blade kept walking, through car after car, mile after mile. There was no end to the train.
Blade was tired of walking. He hung on to a strap and peered out a window. Strange. He had no reflection. The train roared along at great speed-rackety clickety clack — rackety clickety clack. Stations flashed past in a bright blur. Then he saw that they weren't stations at all, but shop windows, and in them the manikins were copulating. Blade thought it shameless of them. He glanced down at his own penis. It was gone.
He screamed. His penis was gone. There was nothing there but a black scar. Blade screamed again and raced back through all the cars, looking for his penis.
No good. It was not to be found. Blade reversed himself and ran toward the front of the train. Ran and ran and ran. At last he reached the front car. The headlight sent a bright shaft down the black tunnel. The rails glinted silver. The train crashed on and on. Blade glanced into the driver's compartment.
The blonde in the mink coat was running the train. She smiled at Blade and pushed the throttle up another notch. «I changed my mind,» she told him. «I have decided to go with you to Hell. Maybe it won't be so bad. A man like you could make it Heaven.»
Blade managed a smile. He did not go into the compartment. He moved so she could not see that he had no penis. She certainly would not want to go with him if she knew that.
The train left the tunnel and shot into the open air. The speed increased. The tracks led off on an upward slant. For a time they rolled through the sky, headed into the glare of the sun.
Blade thought that this was a hell of a way to run a subway, but when he complained to the blonde he found her replaced by a hag, naked and toothless, who grinned at him and dripped saliva on her shrunken breasts. Terror and revulsion gripped Blade. He began to run back through the cars.
The train dipped under water. It flashed past station after station; each platform was crowded with waiting commuters, patient, reading their papers, each with his or her feet planted in a cask of cement. They did not look up as the train roared past.
He glanced out the opposite window and screamed. Another train, its headlight an enormous moon, was approaching from a side track.
Collision. Wreck. No time to escape. The moon headlight bore down. Closer and closer.
The oncoming train whistled once: a warning shriek, a sobbing moan, a fearful blast that tore Blade's head apart. The train crashed through the window and ran him down, smashed him, flattened him, dismembered him. His arms were severed and his legs. His bowels gushed out. His head was lying on the floor of the train.
A high-heeled slipper appeared. It was attached to a beautiful leg. Blade saw the mink coat and through a slit in it he could see her luscious body. He saw she was really a blonde. He blinked his eyes at her, trying to get her attention, trying to get her to save him.
Blade began to scream. The blonde made a comforting noise and bent to pick up his head. She pressed it to her marvelous breasts and crooned to him.
«Don't you worry,» she told him. «You kept your head. Or at least I have it now, and we'll find you another body. You just trust Lascivia and don't worry about a thing. Little old Lascivia will take good care of you.»
She took a suitcase from the luggage rack and put Blade's head in it. The suitcase had a false bottom and the head fell out and through a hole in the floor, beneath the grinding, flashing wheels of the train.
Pain now. Darkness now. Nothing now. His last sob was of relief that this should be. Nothing was beautiful.
CHAPTER 3
Blade awoke. As usual, after he came through the computer, he was naked. He lay unmoving, alert, letting the head pains subside, doing nothing to attract attention or endanger himself. After a time he became aware of the silence. A silence he had never known before. Absolute silence.
Blade moved his head slightly. He seemed to be lying in a park of sorts, on artificial turf, and he got the impression that the plants and bushes and trees were made of plastic. Nothing moved. There was no wind. And that absolute, total, deadly silence. He brushed his hand over the turf and the sound was magnified a hundred times, sounding like a man walking through tall grass.
He could sense no danger. After so many times through the computer, he now adapted almost instantly to conditions in Dimension X. Had there been danger he would have known it. Slowly he got to his feet, searching for the source of light that tossed a bright, yet lambent glow over everything. It was as bright as a soft and cloudy day, and yet he could have sworn that it was not day. As he turned he saw it. The gigantic moon hanging in the sky.
Blade lunged for a clump of bushes-they were plastic and sought to hide himself from that moon. Now his instincts shouted danger and he reacted.
He lay on his back, peering up through a slit in the plastic fronds, and studied the moon. He was impressed and even a bit awed, he who had seen so many fantastic sights and braved so many dangers in so many weird dimensions.
Blade made an instant calculation. Put that gigantic silver orb into HD ratio and it would not be fifty thousand miles from Earth. He could see cities and lakes and mountains and rivers; he could see canals and docks and ships; in the cities he could pick out some large individual buildings. He could see traffic moving, cars of some sort; he could make out what could only be an airport with planes landing and taking off.
Then he saw something else. Light towers, they must be tremendous structures, hundreds of feet high, from which huge spotlights were beamed on this place where he now was. There was the danger. He felt it. There were watchers up there. From now on he must keep under cover as much as possible. The chances were good that he had not been spotted, at least fifty-fifty, but he must take every precaution until he understood more about the situation. They might be friendly. He might want to seek out that great moon-if only to get away from the silence that was already beginning to get on his nerves. But that could wait. He had to explore his present world first.
As long as he remained in the park, in the shelter of the trees, he should be safe. Blade began to move cautiously through the plastic shrubbery. He needed clothing and a weapon. Soon he would need food and water.